My Favourite Tipples from a website development and analytics expert
Jinfo Blog

By Joel Hughes

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Joel Hughes who runs GlassMountains.co.uk, a web design and digital strategy company established in 2001 and based in South Wales. He selects favourite online resources in areas from communication to calendaring.

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Whilst website development may immediately conjure up images of Photoshop etc., that's not really my role. I'm in charge of making sure we understand what clients need, get everything agreed, and then coordinate that with our team. Therefore, my Tipples are based around easing communication.

• Boomerang for Gmail: This one is my outright winner. Boomerang is an extension which sits on top of Gmail (we use Google Apps to power the Glass Mountains email & calendar). With this Chrome extension in place, you get extra options to superboost your email skills. You can compose an email but have it "send later" (this is really handy as I like to work late or really earlier, but my emails all appear to be sent during office hours).
  
  There are many features but I really love the headline function, with this I can send an email and, if the person doesn't get back to me in, say, 2 days, the email will automatically "boomerang" back into the top of my inbox, reminding me that I need to take further action.

• Calendly: If you find yourself wasting loads of back-and-forth emails where you're trying to agree a meeting slot, this tool is for you.
  
  With Calendly, you connect it to your main calendar app (we use Google), and you then indicate slots when people can book you in for meetings or phone calls. Because Calendly is linked to your calendar, it knows when you have existing appointments, so people can't be double booked. You get a notification about a booking request, so you get a chance to accept or not. 
  
  You'll also have a public webpage where people can book, e.g. here is mine: http://calendly.com/joel-hughes (I put this in my email signature).

• InVision app: As a web design company, we share lots of design mockups with clients. InVision app is a fantastic, easy-to-use tool for sharing such mockups online. It allows clients to comment on our mockups and you can even set it up so that your mockups are clickable, allowing clients to get a feel for how your website/app will flow.
  
  
• Slack: Many of us suffer from email overload. Slack helps beat that. It's like real-time chat on steroids. We use it internally and have "channels" for different projects and group chats are easily set up for troubleshooting problems.

One resource I turn to for fun or non-work reasons:

• Lunar Lander: As an Apollo space nut, I love anything space related, so this online version of the classic Lunar Lander is right up my street. There's no download, it just works. It's written as an example to show how powerful modern web browsers are. Enjoy!

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• My favourite recent article on the Jinfo site was "Tags, topics & more - the power of subscription in intranet". We've done a lot of work with intranets and many of the points here struck a chord.

Contribute Your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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